Captain John Hanning Speke (4 May 1827 – 15 September 1864) was an English explorer and army officer who made three exploratory expeditions to Africa.

He is most associated with the search for the source of the Nile and was the first European to reach Lake Victoria (known to locals as Nam Lolwe in Dholuo and Nnalubaale or Ukerewe in Luganda).

Speke was accepted because he had traveled in remote regions alone before, had experience collecting and preserving natural history specimens and had done astronomical surveying.

Showing tremendous determination, he used his bound fists to give his attacker a facial punch; this gave him an opportunity to escape, albeit he was followed by a group of Somalis and had to dodge spears as he ran for his life.

[6] Once in Aden, Burton was not granted a medical certificate to travel and thus Speke left on HMS Furious and arrived in England on 8 May 1859.

The journey, which started from Zanzibar Island in June 1857, where they stayed at the residence of Atkins Hamerton, the British consul,[7] was extremely strenuous and both men fell ill from a variety of tropical diseases once they went inland.

[8] By 7 November 1857, they had traveled over 600 miles on foot and donkey and reached Kazeh (Tabora), where they rested and recuperated among Arab slave traders who had a settlement there.

During this trip Speke, marooned on an island, suffered severely when he became temporarily deaf after a beetle crawled into his ear and he tried to remove it with a knife.

However, much of the expedition's survey equipment had been lost at this point and thus vital questions about the height and extent of the lake could not be answered easily.

Burton was appointed the head of the expedition and considered Speke the second in command, although the pair seemed to have shared the hardships and labours of the journey pretty much evenly.

Bombay was captured as a child near Lake Nyasa by slave traders and was sold to Indian merchants on the coast of Africa who took him to Sindh.

The expedition had lost a great many people through desertions, disease and hostilities, but in Kazeh, on the return journey, Mabruki had recruited local porters.

When back at the coast Burton had written a letter to Norton Shaw of the Royal Geographical Society (which had partially sponsored the journey) in which Burton enclosed a map of Lake Victoria made by Speke and wrote "there are grave reasons for believing it (the lake) to be the source of the principal feeder of the White Nile.

The jealousies and accusations between the two men got ever greater, further inflamed by their respective circles of friends and people who stood to gain from the feud such as book publishers and newspapers.

Burton was still extremely weak, and once he appeared in front of a committee of the RGS he was not able to make a convincing case for his leading a second expedition to settle the outstanding matters about the Nile.

As during the first trip, in this period of history, Arab slave traders had created an atmosphere of great distrust towards any foreigners entering central Africa, and most tribes either fled or fought when encountering them as they assumed all outsiders to be potential slavers.

[6] Local Church Missionary Society records indicate that Speke fathered a daughter whilst staying at the court of Muteesa I the Kabaka (or King) of Buganda.

Because of travel restrictions placed by the local chieftains, slave raiding parties, tribal wars and the difficulty of the terrain, Speke was not able to map the entire flow of the Nile from Lake Victoria north.

This caused some hard feelings between Petherick and Speke, and Baker played into this so he could assume a greater role as an explorer and co-discoverer of the Nile.

They eventually, after tremendous hardships, such as being wracked by fevers and held up by rulers for months on end, found Lake Albert and the Murchison Falls.

Speke had also committed to write a book for John Blackwood which he found hard and time-consuming as he was not naturally a gifted writer.

[17] A contemporary account of the events surrounding his death appeared in The Times:[18] At about 2.30 p.m. on the same day [15 September 1864] Speke set out from his uncle's house in company with his cousin, George Fuller, and a gamekeeper, Daniel Davis, for an afternoon's shooting in Neston Park.

[citation needed]An inquest concluded that the death was accidental, a conclusion supported by his only biographer Alexander Maitland, though the idea of suicide has appealed to some.

Much of Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile is a description of the physical features of Africa's races, in whose condition he found "a strikingly existing proof of the Holy Scriptures.

"[21] Living alongside the locals, Speke claimed to have found a "superior race" of "men who were as unlike as they could be from the common order of the natives" due to their "fine oval faces, large eyes, and high noses, denoting the best blood of Abyssinia" –; that is, Ethiopia.

Speke described their physical appearances as having retained – despite the hair-curling and skin-darkening effects of intermarriage – "a high stamp of Asiatic feature, of which a marked characteristic is a bridged instead of bridgeless nose".

The bar at the five star Sonesta hotel in Nasr City, Cairo, was named after him when it opened in 1982; the then-manager came from the same town as Speke.